Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events- Part 8: The Leftovers

I’ve largely tried to keep the chapters of this series A) grouped thematically and B) under 1,000 words each. As in life, not everything fits into such neat little boxes. With that in mind, here are some of the events the previous chapters missed.

Acts of Vengeance (1989): It’s the old supervillain switcheroo. A group of Loki-led nasties (Dr. Doom, Magneto, the Red Skull, the Kingpin, the Mandarin, and the Wizard) decides the best way to thwart their enemies is to change dance partners. And so you have Spider-Man fighting a giant mutant-hunting Tri-Sentinel, and Rusty and Skids from the New Mutants fighting perennial Spider-baddie the Vulture. The plot, of course, fails, mostly because the villains can’t stop fighting each other, to the point where Loki ends up imprisoning the Kingpin, the Wizard, and the Mandarin. Most importantly, we get a story in Uncanny X-Men about Psylocke being transformed into an Asian, bathing-suit clad ninja programmed to serve regular Iron Man enemy the Mandarin. This version of Betsy Braddock has largely stuck ever since. “Acts of Vengeance” also gave us the first appearance of the New Warriors superhero team, who would go on to inadvertently cause the Civil War. Fun fact: Among the villains who declined the supervillain team-up was Apocalypse. (Matt's aside: A personal favorite from this event is when Holocaust survivor Magneto slaps around Red Skull's Nazi ass in Captain America #367)

Operation: Galactic Storm (1992): A big Avengers-family crossover that spanned Avengers, Avengers West Coast, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Wonder Man and Quasar. The Avengers butt into a war between the Shi’ar and the Kree because the conflict is somehow destabilizing Earth’s sun. The story is considered a throwback to the 1970s’ Kree-Skrull War, in which the Avengers also took part, and features a uniting of the two Avengers teams – East and West Coast – and an overall beefing-up of their ranks (Hey, everybody, Gilgamesh is back!). The crossover has a bit of a bummer ending: A Nega Bomb kills billions of Kree, the mastermind of the whole conflict turns out to be the Kree’s Supreme Intelligence and the Shi’ar annex the Kree, leaving Lilandra’s mad sister Deathbird in charge of them.

Maximum Carnage (1993): AKA the crossover that got me reading comics regularly. Carnage – the figurative lovechild of Venom and the Joker – breaks out of prison and goes on a killing spree across New York with his Harley Quinn, a new supervillain called Shriek, and a gang of Spider-villains including the demonic version of the Hobgoblin, Spidey’s Doppelganger from the Infinity War, and Carrion. To stop them, Spider-Man teams up with Venom, Captain America, Iron Fist, Deathlok, Nightwatch, Cloak & Dagger, Morbius, Firestar, and the Black Cat. The villains are finally defeated with the power of love and hope – in the form of a Stark-tech device apparently powered by the Star Sapphires and Blue Lanterns. The Spidey-title crossover went on to inspire a 1994 Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis video game that came in a sweet red cartridge (And shortly after all that, there was “The Clone Saga,” but the less said about that mess the better).

World War Hulk (2007): A few years back, a secret superhero cabal called the Illuminati (Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Charles Xavier, Dr. Strange, Black Panther, Namor, and Black Bolt) decided the Hulk was too much of a threat and blasted him off into space. While away, he overthrew the rulers of the planet Sakaar, took a wife and made a nice little life for himself. Then the ship that took him there exploded and killed his pregnant wife, and Hulk. Was. Pissed. So he makes his way back to Earth with some space friends to get revenge. After all is smashed and done, Hulk is reverted to his Bruce Banner form and arrested. The Incredible Hulk is renamed The Incredible Hercules, following that hero’s adventures with Amadeus Cho. A new series, Skaar, Son of Hulk, follows the adventures of … well, I suppose it’s obvious. And another new series, Hulk, debuts featuring a Red Hulk who is later revealed to be famed Hulk-hater Gen. Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross.

Shadowland (2010): Before Mark Waid could relaunch Daredevil into one of Marvel’s best books, the character had to be completely run into the ground. And how better to do that than turning him into a demon-possessed ninja lord in a sprawling crossover with the company’s other street-level heroes? In addition to the main series by Andy Diggle and Billy Tan, Shadowland sucked in Spider-Man, the Heroes for Hire, Daughters of the Dragon, Punisher, Wolverine, Moon Knight, Ghost Rider, Black Panther, the Thunderbolts, Shang-Chi, White Tiger, the Night Nurse, and Elektra. Even the Kingpin appears to team up with the heroes in an attempt to stop Matt Murdock and the Hand from destroying New York. Among the series’ repercussions, Daredevil kills Bullseye (Don’t worry, he gets better); Daredevil kills himself (he gets better AND gets a new series); a new Power Man is introduced who looks like the one from Disney XD’s Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon; and the Black Panther, who has an entire country to deal with, takes over patrolling Hell’s Kitchen.

Spider-Verse (2014): A reality-hopping, Spidey-chomping, vampirish character named Morlun and his kin, the Inheritors, seek to wipe out every Spider-Man ever, until they all team up to stop them. We’re talking Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Spider-Woman, “Mayday” Parker aka Spider-Girl, Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider-Ham, Spidey 2099, Ock-Spidey, the Scarlet Spider, Gwen Stacy (whaaaa?), Uncle Ben (whaaaaaaaaa?), et al. Many Spiders die, but many Spiders also live, and some even get their own ongoing series, such as Silk, an Asian-American woman who was bit by the same spider that bit Parker; and new fan-favorite Spider-Gwen, a Gwen Stacy from a reality where she got bit and Peter Parker became the Lizard and died.

So there you have it. It’s not every crossover ever, but hopefully this series gave you more than enough background headed into Secret Wars, which if we’ve timed these right, should be starting nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnow. Happy reading!

Dan Grote’s new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He has been writing for The Matt Signal since 2014. He and Matt have been friends since the days when making it to issue 25 guaranteed you a foil cover.

Fell on Black Days of Future Past: Chris Claremont’s Adventures in the 21st Century.

This column started out as a Rise My Pets feature, similar to the one I did a couple weeks ago on Peter David. But, as happens sometimes, I got sucked down a research rabbit hole, and something different came out on the other side.

It’s easy to geek out when talking about Chris Claremont. Any comics fan worth his pull list could lecture you about the "Dark Phoenix Saga" or "God Loves, Man Kills" or the "Mutant Massacre" or "Life-Death" or "Days of Future Past," classic stories that have been revisited, What If’d and strip-mined practically to death.

But the world has not always been kind to Claremont. And, certainly, nor have I.

Sometime in the mid-2000s, I bestowed upon Claremont the nickname Pappy. By this point, he had already returned to writing the X-titles after a decade’s X-ile at the hands of editorial whim and the rise of the rock-star artists who would go on to found Image Comics. After a far, far shorter stint than his original run on Uncanny X-Men (10 months vs. 16 years), he stepped aside again, this time in favor of rock-star writer Grant Morrison and Joe Casey.

To quote then-new editor-in-chief Joe Quesada in an interview in Wizard, Claremont’s new X-Men comics “were completely unreadable. Right around the time of the movie, the heavy hand of continuity for whatever reason just came crashing down on them.” And he wasn’t wrong. At the time, there was no Cyclops, they were fighting the Neo, Wolverine had just done a stint as a horseman of Apocalypse, Magneto wasn’t around, Rogue was kissing Colossus, Jean Grey and Psylocke had switched powers, Cable had joined the team and was wearing his missing dad’s visor like a chunky necklace, etc.

So Pappy was given his own book to play with, X-Treme X-Men, that still had a few of the team’s heavy hitters, including Storm, Rogue and Gambit, and a quality artist in Salvador Larocca (who left more than halfway through the series). After that book ended with issue 46, he returned to Uncanny from issues 444-473, starting with a good old-fashioned game of baseball and going on to resurrect Psylocke, one of his most precious pets, though he was also the one to kill her in the first place.

After Uncanny, Pappy disappeared again through a haze of increasingly lower-tier and lower-continuity books, including New Excalibur, Exiles, GeNext and X-Men Forever. Given his fondness for slapping his forehead and shaking his head in interviews when asked about changes made to the X-characters in his wake, taking a sort of “In my day” attitude, I started using “Pappy” as shorthand when referring to him. But just like your grandfather or great-grandfather, “in his day,” Claremont probably kicked way more ass than you, and could arguably be considered among the Greatest Generation of Marvel writers, making lasting contributions most of today’s crop can only aspire to.

As I’ve likely made far too obvious in previous columns, I grew up on the ’90s stuff, a decade that was far from perfect. It wasn’t until I started collecting the Essential trades and actually read all 16 years of Claremont’s Uncanny work that I realized how good the X-books were when they were at their best. But, again, we’re not here to talk about the good times. Consider this the second act of a Behind the Music, when the drugs and alcohol take their toll and the album sales slip … except there aren’t any drugs or album sales involved.

Herewith are some of the quirkier quirks of Pappy’s second act:

The Neo: Claremont’s second tour of X-duty started with a six-months-later time jump from the Apocalypse story "The Twelve," creating a whirlwind of plot points and characters that have since been forgotten. Chief among them was a new species called the Neo claiming to be the next evolutionary step. The main problems with the notorious N-E-O were that each issue featured a different group of characters claiming to be Neo and that they were the major the threat for the X-Men at a time when the first movie was introducing many to classic baddies such as Magneto, Mystique and Toad. They have since been wiped out. P.S.: The Neo is a weird name for bad guys created in 2000, just months after the release of The Matrix, which featured a hero called Neo.

Sage: Though created early in Claremont’s time with the X-Men, in 1980 as an aide to Sebastian Shaw named Tessa, Sage didn’t really get her moment until the early 2000s, when Claremont revealed she had been working as an undercover operative for Charles Xavier the whole time. The mutant with the computer brain was then shipped off to the X-Treme team. As the decade progressed, Sage, like Pappy himself, got pushed into more and more irrelevant books, from X-Treme X-Men to New Excalibur to New Exiles, where she merged with the computer on the team’s reality-hopping base … or something. Greg Pak later used the character in a second volume of X-Treme X-Men, which was actually more like Exiles. Either way, it was canceled.

Psylocke: As Claremont’s pets go, Betsy Braddock was one of his oldest and dearest, having created her in the U.K. Captain Britain comics in 1976, a full decade before she joined the X-Men, fulfilling their need at the time for a telepath. The time jump helped Betsy continue her proud tradition of being a convoluted mess, starting with the retconning of how exactly she went from British noble with funny-colored hair to Asian bad girl and Cyclops seducer. Post jump, she and Jean had switched powers, she got a new boyfriend and, to ice the cake, she was killed by a new villain named Vargas in X-Treme. Pappy later resurrected her in his return to Uncanny, in an arc that included her brother Jamie Braddock, another thought-dead character.

Thunderbird III (Neal Sharra): To his credit, Claremont liked to create characters who hailed from all over the world, to give the X-Men a more global feel and appeal to the widest audience possible. Unfortunately, sometimes, readers just don’t care. Pyrokinetic Neal Sharra appeared after the time jump and took the code name of the team’s most consistently dead member, a bad PR move made worse by the fact that this Thunderbird was the “other” kind of Indian, from the Asian subcontinent. Thunderbird III sought the affections of Psylocke, who had been paired off with Archangel in the ’90s, and succeeded until Betsy was killed. Neal shrugged it off and went after X-Treme teammate Lifeguard, another Claremont creation, and the two lived irrelevantly ever after.

Acting like 1992 never happened: After bouncing from Uncanny to X-Treme, back to Uncanny, to Excalibur, to Exiles, and so on, Claremont bounced out of continuity entirely with X-Men Forever, a book intended to show where he would have taken the band of merry mutants had Jim Lee not edged him out in the first place. Hint: He would have killed Wolverine.

Nightcrawler: With any luck, the fuzzy elf is laying the groundwork for Claremont’s third act, the part where the band gets back together and talks about how the music they’re making now is better than ever, regardless of whether it actually is. In April, he launched a Nightcrawler ongoing that reviewers said harkens to classic Chris, in that it contains “a heavy-handed narrative style and classic overexplanation.” Which could just be code for “it has thought bubbles and yellow narrative boxes,” which went passe sometime in the past decade.

Dan Grote has been a Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.

I’ve Got the Runs: Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, issues 1-35, 2010-12

It's a weird week to be writing about Rick Remender, I suppose, after all that business from a couple days ago. But I actually wrote this last month. I was prepared to write a different column, based on something I'd read Sunday that I was pretty excited about, but that announcement was never made, replaced instead by damage control over a firestorm created by a few people misreading 21 issues of Captain America.

Anyway, this is what you get. Enjoy!

Killing is bad. Some people are killers. Those people won’t stop killing unless they are killed. But killing killers makes the killers into killers. And then what’s the difference between the killers and the killer killers? And if you don’t kill the killers, are you responsible for all their future kills?

Cross-eyed yet? Welcome to the rabbit hole that is Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, quite possibly the best book ever to bear the name X-Force. The series is 37 issues (Marvel threw two of those .1 issues into the mix) of the above moral dilemma, featuring five of the darker, edgier, more X-treme X-Men, and nothing but the biggest villains.

Magneto, Apocalypse, Sabertooth, the Shadow King, Mystique, the Blob, Daken, the Reavers, Lady Deathstrike, the fake children of Omega Red, the gang’s all here. Literally: Many of the aforementioned villains formed an alliance to take down Wolverine & Co.

The team also goes on reality-hopping adventures in the Age of Apocalypse and Otherworld, the omniversal home of the Captain Britain Corps., and travels to the future to see what their actions hath wrought, complete with elderly super guest stars.

Our story starts with the age-old dilemma: Would you kill Hitler as a baby? Only in this case, baby Hitler is a 10-year-old Apocalypse. How the team decides to handle young Evan sets into motion the events of the entire series, which alternate between bloodbaths and mental anguish.

“I’m making sure to tell you stories with beginnings, middles and ends, and when those stories are put together, they form a much bigger story – like a Voltron of nerdocity,” Remender told Comic Book Resources in a 2012 interview.

One of Remender’s greatest feats is fleshing out Weapon XIII, Fantomex, the smooth-talking spy/sentinel created during Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. Fantomex’s actions at the end of the first arc set in motion much of the plot of the rest of the series. Watch the master of misdirection woo Psylocke, stand trial by order of Betsy’s brothers and face off against the Skinless Man, aka Weapon III, a newly introduced graduate of the Weapon Plus program, another Morrison-bred concept. Fantomex is hands-down the most physically tortured member of the team, but in undergoing said tortures – and remember, this book is for mature readers, so it’s some pretty grisly stuff – he finds redemption.

But if Fantomex spends the series being physically tortured, Psylocke, the team’s resident telepath, spends it being mentally tortured. Betsy hasn’t been this interesting since Chris Claremont turned a purple-haired British woman into the Mandarin’s personal ninja in the late ’80s. In her attempts to be the team’s conscience, Psylocke is repeatedly forced to make difficult choices and then forced to watch in horror as the consequences of those choices play out, both in the present and in the future. Her despair is so great that at one point she makes a deal that requires her to yield her ability to feel sorrow, and though she makes it, it really doesn’t stick, as her former captive, the Shadow King, exacts revenge on her as a member of a newly formed Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

Remender’s Deadpool may be my favorite version of the character in any of his ongoing titles of the past few years, primarily because he’s sharing the spotlight with four other people and therefore not exhaustingly front and center as he is in his solo title and spinoff series. You could argue the fact that he’s not the center of attention makes the character work harder for it. I’m pretty sure I laughed harder at his heart-to-heart with Evan at the end of the series than I have in much of Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn’s current Deadpool solo book. And I’m a Deadpool fan from way back.

And lest we forget, there’s Wolverine, the whole reason this incarnation of X-Force exists. At this point in his career, Wolverine has become all things to all people. On X-Force, he’s the head killer in charge. In Wolverine & the X-Men, he’s the head of a school, raising the next generation of mutants to fight the good fight. On the Avengers, he’s a brawler in an army of supermen ready to be fastball-specialed at Thanos on a moment’s notice. And while Wolverine is the best at what he does, he still struggles with his conscience and the animal inside, just like he did 40 years ago when Claremont first gave the character depth. And nowhere is his conscience more active than when it comes to his son, Daken, who assembles an Army of royal X-pains – including Sabertooth – to work out his daddy-abandonment issues.

Archangel is also in this book, but I’m not quite sure how to talk about what happens to him without spoiling one of the series’ best arcs, except to say about midway through the series, Nightcrawler joins the team. Not the 616 Nightcrawler, of course, he’s dead at this point. Instead, we get the Age of Apocalypse Nightcrawler, who is much like our Nightcrawler, except he has a red face tattoo, he doesn’t like being called Elf, he’ll betray the team if it means getting revenge on the ones who wronged him, he gets along well with his mother, Mystique, and he really likes teleporting people’s heads off their bodies. Otherwise, totally the same old Kurt Wagner.

And then there’s Deathlok, who serves as the team’s Jiminy Cricket, crossing the time stream to show X-Force how its kills affect the future.

One of the best things about Remender’s run is that it’s self-contained. You don’t have to read a whole bunch of other X-titles or drown in an incomprehensible crossover to enjoy the book. It even completely sidesteps Fear Itself and Avengers Vs. X-Men.

Speaking of the latter crossover, Remender’s next book, Uncanny Avengers, picks up after the events of AvX with a combined team of Avengers and X-Men who spend much of their time cleaning up the messes X-Force made in their last book, in addition to facing big Avengers villains such as the Red Skull and Kang. So if you like Uncanny X-Force, keep reading.

Remender’s Uncanny X-Force is collected in seven trade paperbacks: The Apocalypse Solution, Deathlok Nation, The Dark Angel Saga Books 1 and 2, Otherworld, and Final Execution Books 1 and 2. The series is also available in a hardcover omnibus.